The main reason they did the study was that it is an under-researched area, says Murphy, who worked on it as part of the YouLead programme with Prof Eilis Hennessy and Dr Caroline Heary, for her PhD thesis. “We need to understand better in Ireland how we support parents seeking help for adolescents’ mental health problems.”
For others, stigma around mental health issues still lingers. Some parents reported that they would not talk to those close to them about their adolescent’s problems for fear that other people would judge their parenting and would see them as responsible for their child’s distress. Others were afraid it was their child who would be judged.
The research shows that charity services are an important avenue for parents and many spoke highly of them. These organisations were often able to offer appointments to parents at short notice, when their child was at the height of distress. However, parents also expressed disappointment that these are typically short stints of therapy, after which the adolescent and their parents can feel they have been cut adrift again.
Mother-of-three Carolann Copland has extensive experience of trying to steer two daughters, 10 years apart, through mental health services. She reports little improvement in support during that decade for her youngest child, now aged 19, when compared to when her now 29-year-old daughter was going through adolescence. “There isn’t a system and you are trying to get through what you think is a system,” she tells The Irish Times.
“If we helped the child, the adult won’t suffer so much. I really believe that,” says Copland who found that when her daughters turned 18, the crossover from childhood to adult services “is just a minefield and most of them are lost in the crater”. At that point of transfer, she got almost identically worded letters, 10 years apart, saying that her adult child was not eligible for mental health treatment within the adult system.
Her advice to any parent caring for a troubled adolescent is to look after yourself. “I have seen parents fall apart themselves and then they can’t help their child at all.” “It is not uncommon for someone’s behaviour and emotional wellbeing to become a little ‘out of whack’ for a week or two,” she points out. “However, if there is an ongoing, enduring, persistent element to the difficulty, this heightens the probability that there may be some underlying issue at play.“Whether a mental health support focus rather than a treatment focus is required,” she says, stressing the difference, “will relate to the severity of the symptoms and associated impairment evident.
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